Month: April 2017

If you want to get an abnormal amount of work done in a day, cut out the distractions you allow.

If you want to break from the average, you have to be willing to do the things others aren’t willing to do. You have to be willing to say no to distractions. You have to be willing to do the hard work of analyzing your ideas. You have to be willing to adopt a growth mindset.

When we’re constantly fixated on the verbal agenda—what to say next, what to write next, what to tweet next—it’s tough to make room for truly different perspectives or radically new ideas. It’s hard to drop into deeper modes of listening and attention.

The idea that we should look within, discover our true nature and act accordingly is, according to Confucius, nonsense. What we really are, Puett says, is “a messy and potentially ugly bunch of stuff”, a collection of emotions and conditioned responses, with no guiding inner core. We think we are self-determined, but in reality we are so set in our patterns that Google exploits our predictability to sell us stuff without us noticing.

Getting rich isn’t as simple as changing your mindset. However changing your mindset can go a long way to changing the way you see the world. And when you see the world differently you can behave and respond differently to the stimuli around you. When you do that, you have the potential to outperform.